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The Power Of Communication: Psychology Of Words And Language Revealed | Science 2.0 - 0 views

  • “I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it's something that's inside you. How you think is on the outside, how you feel is on the inside, so that's what I need to understand.”
  • Central processing is triggered by certain queues, such as involvement and immediacy.
  • "Someone like me comes around and realizes that it's not an estate tax, it's a death tax, because you're taxed at death. And suddenly something that isn't viable achieves the support of 75 percent of the American people. It's the same tax, but nobody really knows what an estate is. But they certainly know what it means to be taxed when you die."
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  • Instead of referring to global warmer, the concept is dubbed "climate change" which lessens fears associated with global warming.
  • To better understand the way we react to information, research on communication is vital to understanding our reactions, emotions and how they build our behaviors and actions.
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3 Psychological Theories To Help You Communicate Better With Anyone - 0 views

  • I’ve come across a few that are simple enough to understand and that I think of often, particularly when dealing with other people.
  • Anything above this is a struggle for our brains, so people drop off the bottom of our list as we add more to the top of it.
  • Rather than being frustrated or surprised that your customers don’t “connect” with your brand, think about this: each emotional connection they offer to your company is one they can’t offer to a true friend or family member.
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  • The idea is that when someone appears to be treating you with malice, you should always dig deeper to see if ignorance could be the cause, instead.
  • comes from “motivating” factors like enjoying the work itself, feeling a sense of achievement and having responsibility.
  • There are loads of theories and concepts like these which are useful to know. Do you know a good one? Let us know in the comments.
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Donald Trump's 'bunker' story tells you everything you need to know about him - CNNPoli... - 0 views

  • "Well it was a false report. I was down during the day and I was there for a tiny, little short period of time. And it was much more for an inspection. There was no problem during the day."
  • "I've gone down two or three times, all for inspection. And, you go there, some day you may need it. I went down. I looked at it. It was during the day, and it was not a problem. And I read about it, in like, a big thing. There was never a problem ... nobody ever came close to giving us a problem."
  • This re-framing of history is remarkable solely for the gall it takes to attempt it. After all, every single major media organization reported over the weekend -- with NO pushback from the White House -- that Trump had been taken into the bunker for his own protection, not to, uh, "inspect" it.
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  • "As protesters gathered outside the White House Friday night in Washington, DC, President Donald Trump was briefly taken to the underground bunker for a period of time, according to a White House official and a law enforcement source.
  • "A law enforcement source and another source familiar with the matter tell CNN that first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, were also taken to the bunker.
  • So, why would Trump describe it falsely to Fox? Especially when there are a few other things going on in the country -- most notably ongoing protests over the murder of a black man at the hands of police in Minneapolis and a global pandemic that has killed 106,000 Americans and is projected to kill 135,000 by early August.
  • There is nothing Trump hates more than weakness. And the image of him cowering in an underground bunker while protesters stood outside the gates of the White House is simply not something he cannot accept. This is a man who has been telling himself a story of his life -- one in which he is always the toughest, the smartest and the winner-est -- for, well, his entire adult life.
  • He could have gone anytime, of course! It was just a coincidence he was down there amid the protests outside the White House! Just going down to make sure all the buttons worked! All the brass was sufficiently polished! And the like.
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Covid-19 in the US: Hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 linked to a greater risk ... - 0 views

  • Seriously ill Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were more likely to die or develop dangerous heart arrhythmias, according to a large observational study published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet.
  • Researchers looked at data from more than 96,000 Covid-19 patients from 671 hospitals. All were hospitalized from late December to mid-April and had died or been discharged by April 21. Just below 15,000 were treated with the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, or one of those drugs combined with an antibiotic.
  • Those treatments were linked with a higher risk of dying in the hospital, the study found.
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  • "Previous small-scale studies have failed to identify robust evidence of a benefit and larger, randomised controlled trials are not yet completed," Dr. Frank Ruschitzka, director of the Heart Center at University Hospital Zurich and the study's coauthor, said in a statement.
  • President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus cure. Earlier this week he claimed he was taking daily doses of it as a prophylaxis to prevent infection.
  • Items such as masks and hand sanitizer will be familiar sights in stuffed backpacks. Classes and school buses will have fewer people while some office meetings will be conducted by video conference, experts say.
  • Additionally, the study found serious cardiac arrhythmias were more common among patients who received any of the four treatments. The largest increase was among the group treated with hydroxychloroquine and an an antibiotic -- 8% of those patients developed a heart arrythmia, compared to 0.3% of the control group.
  • Children with underlying health conditions are especially vulnerable, and it's crucial that people follow rules to keep everyone safe, Altmann said. She shared other things US schools must address before unlatching their doors.
  • "We need to quickly test them, diagnose, isolate and then contact trace, which is a lot easier when there's fewer kids they've come into contact with throughout the day," Altmann added.
  • In New York, 16.6% of people have been infected, compared with 1% in California, the researchers said.
  • In the most severe scenario, the CDC assumes that 1% of people overall with Covid-19 and symptoms will die. In the least severe scenario, it puts that number at 0.2%.
  • "Go out, wear a mask, stay six feet away from anyone so you have the physical distancing," he said. "Go for a run. Go for a walk. Go fishing. As long as you're not in a crowd and you're not in a situation where you can physically transmit the virus."
  • Alaska is allowing all businesses to reopen, as well as houses of worship, libraries, museums and sporting activities, starting at 8 a.m. Alaska has the fewest cases of all states and has reported single-digit new cases since mid-April.
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The Paradox of Freedom: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm o... - 0 views

  • “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given,” James Baldwin wrote in contemplating how we imprison ourselves, “freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.” It is hard not to instinctually bristle at this notion — we all like to see ourselves as autonomous agents of our own destiny who would never willfully relinquish our freedom. And yet we do — beyond the baseline laws of physics and their perennially disquieting corollary regarding free will, which presupposes that even the nature of the faculty doing the relinquishing is not the sovereign entity we wish it were, we are governed by myriad ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological forces that mitigate the parameters of our freedom. Neuroscientist Christoph Koch put it perfectly in his treatise on free will: “Freedom is always a question of degree rather than an absolute good that we do or do not possess.”
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Coronavirus: The psychology of panic buying - BBC Worklife - 0 views

  • LLast Saturday afternoon, Kristina Moy decided to swing by her local supermarket in the US city of Seattle to pick up some weekly groceries and supplies for her son’s upcoming baseball tournament. What started as a quick errand turned into a three-hour ordeal, navigating checkout lanes packed with hundreds of shoppers stocking up amid the outbreak of coronavirus.
  • Moy isn’t the only one to experience long queues and empty shelves. Mass demand for rice and instant noodles in Singapore prompted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to assure the public there was enough to go around. In Auckland, New Zealand, supermarket spending shot up 40% last Saturday compared to the same day a year ago. And shoppers in Malaysia wanting to pad “pandemic pantries” – grocery hoards to fill people’s kitchens until the crisis dies down – have driven an 800% increase in weekly hand sanitiser sales. (All of those places have confirmed cases of Covid-19.)
  • With events like looming natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood, people frequently stock up with emergency supplies. “It is rational to prepare for something bad that looks like it is likely to occur,” says David Savage, associate professor of behavioural and microeconomics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who’s written about the rationality behind stocking up in a crisis. However: “It is not rational to buy 500 cans of baked beans for what would likely be a two-week isolation period.”
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  • Irrational stockpiling can also lead to price gouging, says Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics. “If the price of a roll of toilet paper is tripled, that’s seen as a scarcer commodity to acquire, which can lead to anxiety,” he says.
  • Panic buying, Taylor says, is fuelled by anxiety, and a willingness to go to lengths to quell those fears: like queueing for hours or buying way more than you need. We’ve seen this before throughout history. Back in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed imminent, American families filled their basements with enough canned goods and bottled water to survive an atomic blast.
  • “But for many people, hand-washing seems to be too ordinary. This is a dramatic event, therefore a dramatic response is required, so that leads to people throwing money at things in hopes of protecting themselves.”
  • “Panic is a subjective, emotional state, and mostly what we can observe is the behaviour,” says Oppenheim. “Maybe someone reads articles or a couple of tweets about supply chain disruptions in China and mask shortages in Hong Kong, and then makes a very reasoned decision to stock up on masks just in case. All we can infer from the purchasing is the timing, so it could look panicky even if it's well thought through.”
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The Coronavirus Put Stock Market in Uncharted Territory - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Over the past week, stock markets around the world plunged as distressing news about the spread of the novel coronavirus continued to accumulate.
  • The global stock market is, theoretically, the distillation of how investors think everything that happens in the world will play out in the economy. Right now, judging by these drops, investors are much less optimistic than they were a week ago. But what they’re predicting is not only how bad the outbreak could be in terms of workers staying home sick, drops in consumer spending, or supply-chain disruptions; it’s also how bad people think it could be.
  • What investors think the public is thinking is therefore crucial.
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  • Public perception of a crisis can be extremely consequential in financial markets.
  • Predicting the emotional reactions of the entire world population to coronavirus would be a bit easier if investors could turn to the market effects of previous pandemics for guidance. But history provides few indications of what might happen to the economy if the coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes, continue to spread.
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Theodore Roosevelt on the Cowardice of Cynicism and the Courage to Create Rather Than T... - 0 views

  • The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt
  • There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic,” Maya Angelou wrote in contemplating courage in the face of evil, “because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
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The world sacrificed its elderly in the race to protect hospitals. The result was a cat... - 0 views

  • Three months ago, as the novel coronavirus began to gain a foothold in countries across Europe, officials in the UK said they were still confident that the risk to the British public remained low.
  • but at the time there were just 13 confirmed cases and no deaths in the UK. While the government ordered hospitals to prepare for an influx of patients, its advice to some of the country's most vulnerable people -- elderly residents of care or nursing homes -- was that they were "very unlikely" to be infected.
  • By May 1, of the 33,365 total confirmed deaths in England and Wales, at least 12,526 -- or 38% -- were care home residents, according to the latest estimates from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
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  • The UK is not alone. Many other nations were slow to respond to the threat at care home facilities, and the consequences have been devastating.
  • Comparing death tolls can be difficult: some countries have separate data covering elderly care homes, while others include facilities for those with disabilities. Some countries do not include in their data those residents who die in hospitals, some have regional variation​, and some have no data at all.
  • There had been 1,661 coronavirus deaths among care home residents out of 3,395 total coronavirus deaths in Sweden by May 14, or 49%, according to LTCcovid's report.
  • 19 residents out of 110 had died in the past two months, but only five were confirmed Covid-19 deaths -- the rest were "undetermined," he said. He said he thought there had been "slight under-reporting" of deaths in the UK because of a lack of testing, and said the situation had been "harrowing."
  • A similar story played out in France, where coronavirus fatalities among care home residents in all settings make up more than half of all coronavirus deaths recorded as of May 18, according to health ministry data used in the LTCcovid report.
  • Elderly care sector professionals and care home workers published a letter to Health Minister Olivier Véran on March 20 expressing alarm and requesting 500,000 masks per week in affected areas, to which he agreed.
  • By March 24, the Spanish army was drafted in to help and found "abandoned" ​care home residents dead in their beds, according to Defense Minister Margarita Robles. The government said at its briefing the next day that the information had been passed to the public prosecutor, who was investigating. New care home guidelines called for extended isolation measures, but some homes said they would now have to send all staff home to comply.
  • She said the DHSC was prioritizing testing in care homes and had provided £3.2 billion ($3.9 billion) to local authorities to ease pressure on services including care homes, as well as an additional £600 million ($730 million) for homes last week. "Since the start of this pandemic we have worked to ensure our care homes and frontline care workforce get the support they need. Almost two thirds of care homes have not had an outbreak and deaths in all settings, including care homes, are falling."
  • Raffaele Antonelli Incalzi, head of the Italian geriatric society SIGG, said in a statement in early April that care homes were "biological time bombs," in part because overcrowded hospitals were moving elderly patients to unprepared homes.
  • The UK initially did not record care home deaths. While the latest official ONS data for England and Wales shows that 38% of coronavirus deaths occurred in care homes, LTCcovid said the figure could be far higher.
  • LTCcovid's report found that 3,890 of Canada's 4,740 coronavirus-linked deaths took place among care home residents as of May 8, or 82%, and Health Canada told CNN the percentage was nearly 80% on May 19. Canada's largest province, Ontario, has announced an independent inquiry.
  • Of the 247 total Covid-19 deaths in South Korea that had been confirmed as of April 30, 84 were care home residents -- a share of 34%. No large care home outbreaks have occurred since the measures were implemented.
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No Crowds at the Mona Lisa: Coronavirus Fears Hammer European Tourism - WSJ - 0 views

  • The coronavirus outbreak in Europe is scaring away travelers and hammering tourism just as the high season is getting under way. Thousands of people have canceled their trips to the region since the disease began to spread in Italy last month, drying up revenue for hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and conference planners across the continent. Those businesses are the economic lifeblood of many regions in Europe, clustered around its famed cultural attractions. The outbreak is costing the European Union’s tourism industry €1 billion ($1.1 billion) a month, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner.
  • In Paris, some cafes and nightclubs have seen a 40% drop in sales, he said.
  • Flight bookings to Europe the last week of February, when the Italian outbreak emerged, fell 79% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to ForwardKeys, which tracks travel data. In Italy, cancellations have exceeded new bookings over that time, the firm said
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  • The Vatican is facing a sharp drop in visitors to the Vatican Museums, which bring in €40 million in profit in a normal year and are a key revenue source for the church. Vatican officials declined to comment on a report in an Italian newspaper saying the museums had experienced a 60% drop in attendance
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The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • t was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.
  • Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.
  • Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.
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  • The supporters of inclusive writing say the strong institutional pushback in France is rooted in a misunderstanding of what language is meant to do; it should be a vector for social progress, they argue. “Language is … the space where we must inscribe societal transformations,”
  • Nevertheless, this May, Haddad and his firm released an online manual that codified inclusive writing for corporations and institutions. He believes that inclusive writing can successfully help businesses deal with gender inequality.
  • d. If France is serious about gender equality, there may be more efficient ways to get there than inclusive writing. And while cultural conservatism is definitely involved in the backlash, it’s not the only factor. “Mastery of a complex orthographic system is an important piece of cultural capital,” explained Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “and people everywhere object to any development that devalues it.”
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How your phone affects your health - Insider - 0 views

  • When was the last time you disinfected your phone? According to a 2017 study, high levels of bacterial contamination can be found on the surface of cell phones.
  • Time magazine suggests that your phone could be 10 times dirtier than your toilet seat.
  • Frequently looking down at your phone for extended periods of time puts a strain on your neck
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  • All of your devices emit short wavelength light, known as blue light. A Harvard study claimed that exposure to blue light before bed decreases natural melatonin production, a hormone that regulates sleep. The brightness from your phone screen can interrupt your natural circadian rhythm, and cause for shorter REM cycles and overall restless sleep.
  • With a constant influx of information grabbing your attention, it can put pressure on you to have your phone on you at all times to stay informed. Researchers agreed, telling The Chicago Tribune that the possibility of missing something if you don’t keep your phone nearby can induce a feeling of stress and anxiety. 
  • Remember the blue light? The cornea and lens can’t filter it, so the light goes to the back of the eye, which can weaken vision over time.
  • Though social media can be fun entertainment, it can also open up the door for harmful comparison. Being able to keep up to date with someone else’s success (or pitfalls) invites the opportunity for you to compare your life to theirs. That can invoke a feeling of inadequacy and unhappiness, according to Psychology Today
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Carl Sagan on Mystery, Why Common Sense Blinds Us to the Universe, and How to Live with... - 0 views

  • “We are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”
  • In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher Natalie Batalha said something that stopped me up short: as sentient beings endowed with awareness, we are “the universe itself becoming aware.” Echoing poet Diane Ackerman’s lovely notion of “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” Dr. Batalha added: “It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to create the portal to the universe which is my physical self. So in that statement is this idea, or the fluidity of time and space. And I kind of see it all at once. And I don’t know what ‘me’ is. I just feel part of everything. And I feel such deep gratitude for being able to take this conscious look at the universe — at myself as being part of the universe.”
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Walt Whitman's Advice to the Young on the Building Blocks of Character and What It Take... - 0 views

  • “In the long run,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in considering how we bring about social change, “there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely, and then act boldly.” A generation after her, Albert Camus examined what it really means to be a rebel and asserted that the true rebel is not one who aims to destroy the existing order of things but one who “says yes and no simultaneously.” And yet the hardest project of self-actualization is that of discerning what to accept and what to reject — of the world and of ourselves — as we build the architecture of our character and stake out our stance in relation to our obstacles and aims.
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Why don't we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus? | Owen Jone... - 0 views

  • It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.
  • More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time
  • Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity.
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  • There is a key difference between coronavirus and climate crisis, of course, and it is shame. “We didn’t know coronavirus was coming,” says Stirling. “We’ve known the climate crisis was on the cards for 30 or 40 years.” And yet – despite being inadequately prepared because of an underfunded, under-resourced NHS – the government can swiftly announce an emergency pandemic plan.
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The Habits of Light: A Celebration of Pioneering Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Whose Ca... - 0 views

  • “Nothing is fixed. All is in flux,” physicist Alan Lightman wrote in his soaring meditation on how to live with our longing for absolutes in a relative universe, reminding us that all the physical evidence gleaned through millennia of scientific inquiry indicates the inherent inconstancy of the cosmos.
  • This awareness, so unnerving against the backdrop of our irrepressible yearning for constancy and permanence, was first unlatched when the ancients began suspecting that the Earth, rather than being the static center of the heavens it was long thought to be, is in motion, right beneath our feet. But it took millennia for the most disorienting evidence of inconstancy to dawn — the discovery that the universe itself is in flux, constantly expanding, growing thinner and thinner as stars grow farther and farther apart.
  • If the universe is constantly expanding, to trace it backward along the arrow of time is to imagine it smaller and smaller, all the way down to the seeming nothingness that banged into the somethingness within which everything exists.
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Why people believe the Earth is flat and we should listen to anti-vaxxers | Elfy Scott ... - 0 views

  • I understand why scientifically minded people experience profound frustration at the nonsense, particularly when we’re forced to consider the public health implications of the anti-vaxxer movement which has been blamed as the root cause for recent outbreaks of measles in the US, a viral infection which can prove devastating for babies and young children. Misinformation can cause immense suffering and we should do our utmost to dispel the lies.
  • Too many people in scientific spheres seem to revel in dismissing flat-Earthers and anti-vaxxers as garden variety nut-jobs and losers. It may be cathartic – but it’s not productive.
  • It’s interesting that for a scientific community so perennially pleased with itself, we all seem to be making the same fundamental attribution error by ignoring the notion that belief in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories is propelled by external pressures of fear, confusion and disempowerment. Instead we seem too often satisfied with pinning the nonsense on some bizarrely flourishing individual idiocy.
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  • When we feel so fundamentally disenfranchised, it’s comforting to concoct a fictional universe that systemically denies you the right cards. It gives you something to fight against and makes you self-deterministic. It provides an “us and them” narrative that allows you to conceive of yourself as a little David raging against a rather haughty, intellectual establishment Goliath. This is what worries me about journalists writing columns or tweets sneering at the supposed stupidity of the pseudoscientists and con spiracy theorists – it only serves to enforce this “us and them” worldview.
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Goldman Sachs issues warning about US unemployment - CNN - 0 views

  • The unemployment rate in the United States will peak at 25%, rivaling the worst period of the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs warned on Wednesday.
  • The unemployment rate spiked to 14.7% in April as the economy lost more than 20 million jobs during the self-imposed shutdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Goldman Sachs previously projected the unemployment rate would peak at 15%. The new forecasts are based on government statistics, the first glimpse of the reopening process and new big data sources, the bank said.
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  • Annual data, which go back to 1929, show that the unemployment rate peaked during the Great Depression at an average of 24.9% in 1933.
  • Goldman Sachs warned Wednesday that the real jobless rate will peak at 35%, up from the bank's previous projection for a peak of 29%.
  • , told CNN last week that the real jobless rate could hit 25% before "hopefully" falling following a transition period this summer.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday that the "consequences could be really serious" if states reopen ahead of the guidelines issued by the White House.
  • Goldman also upgraded its GDP forecasts, predicting a "somewhat more V-shaped path" as states relax lockdown orders. The bank now expects rapid annualized growth of 29% in the third quarter, up from 19% previously.
  • And Goldman noted several "serious health risks": "insufficient testing and contact tracing" in some states, reopening high-risk sectors and limited evidence of how effective measures like social distancing and will be.
  • "Prolonged weakness could cause severe scarring effects such as permanent layoffs and business closures that delay the recovery," Goldman Sachs economists wrote.
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Germany: Half of refugees find jobs within five years | News | DW | 04.02.2020 - 0 views

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  • A new study published on Tuesday found that 49% of refugees who have come to Germany since 2013 were able to find steady employment within five years of arriving.
  • "This means that labor market integration is somewhat faster than for refugees from previous years," said the Insitute for Labor Market and Vocational Research (IAB), who carried out the study.
  • While 68 percent reported having a job, this included both full and part-time. Moreover, 17% of this group are involved in a paid training scheme and 3% have a paid internship, a form of employment that often does not pay enough to live off.
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The Worst Part of the Woodward Tapes Isn't COVID. - 0 views

  • 1. Woodward
  • I'd like to take the other side of this Trump-Woodward story and offer two curveball views:
  • (1) I do not believe that Donald Trump "knew" how dangerous the coronavirus was. Allow me to explain.
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  • This is simply how the man talks. About everything. What's more, he says everything, takes the both sides of everything:
  • Does he believe any of this, either way? Almost certainly not. The man has the brain of a goldfish: He "believes" whatever is in front of him in the moment. No matter whether or not it contradicts something he believed five minutes ago or will believe ten minutes from now.
  • All this guy does is try to create panic. That's his move
  • (2) The most alarming part of the Woodward tapes is the way Trump talks about Kim Jong Un and the moment when Trump literally takes sides with Kim Jong Un against a former American president.
  • In a way, it would be comforting to believe that our president was intelligent enough to grasp the seriousness of the coronavirus, even if his judgment in how to deal with the outbreak was malicious or poor.
  • All of the available evidence suggests the opposite:
  • Donald Trump lacks the cognitive ability to understand any concepts more complicated than self-promotion or self-preservation.
  • Put those two together—constant exaggerating self-aggrandizement and the perpetual attempt to stoke panic—and what you have is a guy was just saying stuff to Woodward.
  • After the Woodward tapes, anyone still deluding themselves about the authoritarian danger Trump poses to America is, finally, all out of excuses.
  • This, right here, is the most damning revelation from the Woodward tapes (so far):   Trump reflected on his relationships with authoritarian leaders generally, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?” It's not hard to explain. And it's not funny.
  • You have this incredible rise in interest in technology and excitement about technology and the beat itself really took off while I was there. But then at the same time, you have this massive new centralization of government control over technology and the use of technology to control people and along with that rising nationalism.
  • Paul Mozur, who covers China and tech for the New York Times and is currently living in Taiwain, after the Chinese expelled all foreign journalists. 
  • That was more apparent, I think, over the past five years or so after Xi Jinping really consolidated power, but the amount of cameras that went up on street corners, the degree to which you used to be able to — there’s a moment maybe seven or eight years ago — where Jack Ma talked about the Tiananmen Square crackdowns on Chinese social media and now that’s just so utterly unthinkable. The degree to which the censorship has increased now to the level where if you say certain things on WeChat, it’s very possible the police will show up at your door where you actually have a truly fully formed Internet Police. . .
  • I think a lot of Chinese people feel more secure from the cameras, there’s been a lot of propaganda out there saying the cameras are here for your safety. There is this extremely positive, almost Utopian take on technology in China, and a lot of the stuff that I think, our knee-jerk response from the United States would be to be worried about, they kind of embrace as a vision of the future. .
  • The main reasons WeChat is a concern if you were the United States government is number one, it’s become a major vector of the spread of Chinese propaganda and censorship, and because it’s a social network that is anchored by a vast majority of users in China who are censored and who are receptive to all this propaganda, even if you’re overseas using WeChat and not censored in the same way, what you get is mostly content shared from people who are living in a censored environment, so it basically stays a censored environment. I call that a super filter bubble; the idea is that there are multiple filter bubbles contending in a website like Facebook, but with WeChat, because it’s so dominated by government controls, you get one really big mega pro-China filter bubble that then is spread all over the the world over the app, even if people outside of China don’t face the same censorship. So that’s one thing.
  • The second is the surveillance is immense and anybody who creates an account in China brings the surveillance with them overseas
  • And most people, frankly, using WeChat overseas probably created the accounts in China, and even when they don’t create the account in China, when national security priorities hit a certain level, I think they’re probably going to use it to monitor people anyway. I’ve run into a number of people who have had run-ins with the Chinese Internet Police either in China, but some of them outside of China, in their day-to-day life using WeChat, and then they return home and it becomes apparent that the Internet Police were watching them the whole time, and they get a visit and the police have a discussion with them about what their activities have been
  • So it’s also a major way that the Chinese government is able to spy on and monitor people overseas and then unsurprisingly, because of that, it’s used as a way for the Chinese intel services to harass people overseas. . . .
  • WeChat is particularly suited to this in part because every single person who uses WeChat within China has it linked to their real identity. And then because everybody on WeChat has linked to their real identity, you can map their relationship networks and lean on them that way.
  • It also has a bunch of tools that the Chinese police use, for instance key words, where you can set an alarm so that if you were to say “Tiananmen”, they could set an alarm so that anytime you say that they get a warning about that, and then they go look at what you’ve written. So there’s all these tools that are uniquely created for Chinese state surveillance that are within the app that they can also use, so there’s a bunch of ways that the app is just better.
  • It’s also one of the very few unblocked communication tools that goes between the two countries. So for all these reasons it’s a very, very big deal. For the Chinese government, it’s an important tool of social control, and it’s been a way that they’ve been able to take the social controls that exist within China and expand them to the diaspora community in some pretty unnerving ways.
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